trying to be true to amazon

I really try to buy things locally whenever reasonable. I'm willing to pay a
fairly substantial premium to do so, because I like to support my town. That
said, Amazon gets a lot of my business. They have a lot of things that it's
hard to get locally, we have no local bookstores that I consistentlylike
shopping with, and Amazon Prime makes it feel like there's never any shipping
tax on my orders.

Today, I wanted to order some new hardware for doing SuperDuper! backups of our
laptops. I had a $50 gift certificate, so I had to shop with Amazon (or, I
think, a partner; it's hard to tell, but zShops at least were out). When I
searched for things, I kept finding stuff listed at one price that then showed
up at another when I clicked on the search result. Why? The search listed the
cheapest price, but the main price listed on the item's page was the Amazon
price. Now things got confusing: for me, the Amazon price was exact, as I
would pay no shipping. For other vendors, I'd have to go figure out shipping.
For yet others, I would not be able to use my gift certificate. Without the
gift certificate, I'd be better off using Newegg, from whom I buy hardware most
often.

Eventually I got things sorted: I ordered a hard drive enclosure from
TigerDirect via Amazon with my certificate, but had to pay shipping. That left
me with about seven dollars on the certificate, so I looked into getting some
cables I needed. All the search results were coming up showing a few bucks,
but the Amazon item price would be $20.

I really want to do business with Amazon, not their little remoras. While I
like the fact that those symbiotic partner stores are there for me, sometimes I
just want to force the Amazon product search engine to only show me "from
Amazon" results.

It's a shame that I do not really have All My Email Ever. I would have my
original receipt for my first few Amazon purchases, with the ancient logo and
everything. I think I ordered them with the Lynx browser. At least I can pull
up the records of the order. Chip might be proud:
Slack!

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I totally agree. I had the same problem when I had the Prime trial. Even without Prime it is often much easier to get everything directly from Amazon to get the super-saver or combined shipping. They really need to add an option to search only Amazon.
I sent them a comment requesting this a while back and here is what they said:

Thank you for writing to Amazon.com with your comments about search
for only marketplace item.
At present we do not have a facility to to search for marketplace
items.